Pros:

Cons:

Last year, the strange winds of business blew San Diego's Angel Studios into the hands of Rockstar, and the long-prophesied Red Dead Revolver was a leaf in the current. Once promised by Capcom, the game has been in what Hollywood calls "development hell" forever, where it probably had shelf space next to Kevin Costner's Open Range. Full of sagebrush and unshaven bad guys, it's a very arcade-like shooter that pits the violently orphaned Red against the dastardly varmints what killed his family.

Red looks like Jim Lee's vision of Wolverine, transported back to the set of A Fistful Of Dollars. Instead of claws, this kid has sixguns, as well as rifles, throwing knives, dynamite, and saddle sores. Cutscenes fill in the story between levels packed with enemies that typically end either with a boss battle or a time-based standoff. The shootin' mechanics keep Red interesting for a while, but before the cows come back home he starts to look like tarnished tin.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Never

Standard third-person controls allow Red to aim and shoot on the run, though he can also take cover, kill.switch-style, behind boulders, outhouses, and anything else bigger than a breadbasket. By and large the controls (particularly when taking aim and firing) are quite smooth, but the cover-taking doesn't work well. Here, controls don't always flow, leaving Red crouching when you need to run, and standing around taking fire while you desperately try to get ... behind ... that ... boulder!

Two unique shooting modes help Red out of jams. The first is the "Dead-Eye" system. I'm trying not to say The Matrix, but damned if this ain't Clint Eastwood's bullet time. Pressing a button cranks the game speed down to slow-motion, and targeting points appear on enemies wherever the reticule floats. Pull the trigger to go back into real-time and fire lead into the batch of targets. There are six playable characters and varieties of Dead-Eye for each.

For anyone who's wanted to yell 'Draw!' outside of Pictionary, there's also a "Duel" system. It uses the same slow motion to simulate the quick-draw duel. Pull back on the right stick and then jam it forward to draw your gun, then target before a slow-motion timer runs out. It's a neat trick, but it ends up being just a quick (and forced) way to create a boss battle; I really wanted the duels to be better incorporated into the game. There's no way, for example, to force a duel when you're low on health and think your quick trigger finger will be the only way out.

Cowboys Ain't Ambitious Men

Though Red Dead doesn't aspire to much more than arcade-shooter status, it's got plenty of ideas. But it feels like more time was spent trying to get the tangential concepts to kinda work, rather than refining the basic game system. Many of the shoulda'-been-cool touches come off as half-baked, like the additional playable characters, the bar-fighting, horse (and bull and bison) riding, train-jumping, and stagecoach-jacking, as well as a couple gatling gun emplacements for you Wild Bunch fans. So much of Red Dead feels like it's caught between two camps -- arcade and more modern third-person action -- that it all feels compromised.